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About Me

Karin Nielsen, MD, MPH is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA and has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1996. She has been the Co-PI of the HPTN for Brazil for the past several years, the current vice chair of the PACTG perinatal scientific committee, and has been elected as an international member of the Scientific Oversight Committee of the IMPAACT leadership group. She is an attending physician for Pediatric Infectious Diseases and for the CARE-4-Families Clinic at UCLA. Dr. Nielsen has a Masters Degree in epidemiology from UCLA’s School of Public Health. She obtained her MD from the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and completed pediatric residency training at the Hospital dos Servidores. She has been at UCLA since 1991 where she completed both research and clinical fellowships in Pediatric Infectious Diseases. Dr. Nielsen’s main area of research has been pediatric/perinatal HIV infection, and she has conducted studies in the pathogenesis of transmission of HIV, studies of virologic and immunologic markers of pediatric long term survival in HIV infection, treatment trials and PK studies of protease inhibitors in children, development of biological assays for diagnostics and monitoring of viral resistance, and immunological studies. She has developed or assisted in the development of seven NIH protocols to be implemented in Brazil and at other international sites.

Dr. Nielsen is a member of international, perinatal and microbicide committees with the HPTN, is the Vice-chair of the perinatal PACTG Research Agenda Committee and is also involved in three AACTG studies to be conducted internationally. Dr. Nielsen served as chair for PACTG/ HPTN protocols for prevention of mother to child transmission (PACTG 1043/ HPTN 040), an AACTG/ PACTG protocol for monitoring of adverse events among antiretroviral and HIV exposed infants (AACTG 5190/ PACTG 1054), and co-chair for HPTN 052 (an international study of sexual transmission of HIV), and PACTG 1048 (an HIV treatment trial of infants). She also served as a protocol team member in AACTG 5175, AACTG 5207, and HPTN 057. At UCLA she conducts studies of fungal infections in immunocompromised patients.